Urinary incontinence (UI) is a major health problem that affects as many as 25 million people in the United States at an estimated annual cost of nearly 20 billion dollars. Results of recent surveys of the United States population suggest that UI is a problem that is prevalent among 38% of adult women, over 50% of nursing home residents, and even up to 10-20% of children. Thus, UI affects a broad spectrum of the population where the members thereof will inevitably possess a broad range of anatomical proportions and anomalies, as well as have medical histories that can have an impact on a person's bladder filling and/or fluid retention capabilities.
Conventional approaches to dealing with UI have focused on the use of bladder monitors that include an acoustic system coupled to a patient's abdomen. These systems direct one or more acoustic beams into the abdomen and then sense the echoes generated when the acoustic beams reflect off the front and back walls of the patient's bladder. The echoes are processed in accordance with algorithms to determine bladder size or volume. Alarms are sounded, displayed, etc., when the bladder is full or nearly full. However, conventional systems tend to work well on specific members of the population (e.g., the young and/or thin patients) when those members are lying down or standing up. However, since UI is prevalent across a broad spectrum of ages, anatomical proportions, patients that are not always lying down or standing up, etc., conventional bladder monitors fall short of serving as an “every man” bladder monitor that can adapt to a particular patient's anatomical idiosyncrasies and/or body orientation.